The artificial intelligence boom is real. But is this AI hype worth it? This is the question companies across tech have started to ask themselves. Ride-hailing platform Uber Technologies is the latest entrant that is openly questioning whether the economics of large-scale AI investments are making any sense. The company president and chief operating officer Andrew Macdonald has acknowledged that it is struggling to measure the benefits of the AI tools.
Macdonald recently spoke in an interview withRapid Responseand admitted that the organisation is struggling to measure the real-world gains of its growing reliance on AI tools like Anthropic’s Claude Code.
He reportedly highlighted that the ride-hailing platform has not yet found a direct link between rising AI usage and concrete improvements in consumer features. Macdonald said, “That link is not there yet. It’s very hard to draw a line between one of those stats and, okay, now we’re actually producing 25 per cent more useful consumer features.”
Moreover, he believes that while using Claude Code and ChatGPT metrics could be seen growing, the organisation is still finding it difficult to improve so that customers are seeing equally strong benefits.
As per The Verge, Uber has exhausted its planned annual AI budget within the initial four months of this year. It reportedly spent $3.4 billion on research and development last year, marking a nine per cent increase from 2025.
These comments come at a time when the company CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, noted that Uber was slowing down hiring as it started focusing on AI investments. Additionally, the company suggested that AI tools may have boosted productivity to reduce the need for expanding headcount at the same place.
“We’re going to have to start talking about token consumption and the associated cost versus headcount,” Macdonald stated.
He added, “If you’re not actually able to draw a direct line to how many useful features and functionality you’re shipping to your users, that trade becomes harder to justify.”
This incident shows howbig techis spending heavily on AI that might not be as fruitful as they expected. For several tech giants, the AI gold rush could slowly be turning into a search for proof.
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